by Julie Ann Dawson
Member since:
April 26, 2007 McCain versus Bush 2000
August 25, 2008 04:47 PM EDT
views: 37 | rating: 10/10 (3 votes) | comments: 7
File this all under "Everything Old Is New Again."
"Do we really want another president in the White House that America can't trust?"
An election year ad questions McCain's trustworthiness. No, it wasn't produced by Obama. It was released in 2000, when McCain was running against Bush for the Republican nomination.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/htmlContent.jhtml?html=/archive/2000/02/09/wpres09.html"I will not need on-the-job training in the White House."
A McCain ad, noting his years of experience over his opponent. Nope. He wasn't talking about Obama. He was referring to Bush.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/htmlContent.jhtml?html=/archive/2000/02/01/wpres101.html"In stump speeches, he argued that Mr McCain's war record did not necessarily make him the best candidate to be commander-in-chief of the armed forces and that his credentials as a conservative were far from what South Carolinians deserved."
"A spokesman for Vietnam prisoners of war appeared on stage to accuse Mr McCain of abandoning them as a politician after he had been released from a Hanoi prison."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/htmlContent.jhtml?html=/archive/2000/02/05/wbush05.htmlAgain, Bush directly attacked McCain's "Untouchable" POW status in 2000.
Bush supporters went so far as to accuse McCain of siring a black child out of wedlock.
"It didn't take much research to turn up a seemingly innocuous fact about the McCains: John and his wife, Cindy, have an adopted daughter named Bridget. Cindy found Bridget at Mother Theresa's orphanage in Bangladesh, brought her to the United States for medical treatment, and the family ultimately adopted her. Bridget has dark skin.
Anonymous opponents used "push polling" to suggest that McCain's Bangladeshi born daughter was his own, illegitimate black child. In push polling, a voter gets a call, ostensibly from a polling company, asking which candidate the voter supports. In this case, if the "pollster" determined that the person was a McCain supporter, he made statements designed to create doubt about the senator.
Thus, the "pollsters" asked McCain supporters if they would be more or less likely to vote for McCain if they knew he had fathered an illegitimate child who was black. In the conservative, race-conscious South, that's not a minor charge. We had no idea who made the phone calls, who paid for them, or how many calls were made. Effective and anonymous: the perfect smear campaign.
Some aspects of this smear were hardly so subtle. Bob Jones University professor Richard Hand sent an e-mail to "fellow South Carolinians" stating that McCain had "chosen to sire children without marriage." It didn't take long for mainstream media to carry the charge. CNN interviewed Hand and put him on the spot: "Professor, you say that this man had children out of wedlock. He did not have children out of wedlock." Hand replied, "Wait a minute, that's a universal negative. Can you prove that there aren't any?"
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/03/21/the_anatomy_of_a_smear_campaign/More Bush Attacks on McCain:
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/02/28/bush-mccain-2000/Now you would think that McCain would want to distance himself as much as possible from a man whose campaign used his own adoptive daughter as a target against him. You'd think he would distance himself from a man that ridiculed his years as a POW and attempted to smear his reputation. But instead, McCain has not only embraced Bush, but also embraced Bush's "win at all costs" methodology. McCain, like Bush before him, hides behind his supporters who constantly spread lies about Obama and his family, all the while pretending to take the high road even as his campaign spends money on ads comparing Obama to Paris Hilton and making insulting statements like "Hot Chicks Dig Obama."
It's sad that the American public seems to have such a short memory. You'd think we'd get tired of the smears and actually want to learn the truth.
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